During a lifetime of steadfast fealty to the Roman Catholic Church, Archbishop William Levada has distinguished himself as a man with a rare blend of intellect, business savvy and deep devotion to his God.

When he was first appointed to the Bay Area in 1995, dispatched to lead a fractious flock reeling from church closings and clergy misconduct, many considered the conservative Levada a curious choice in a region renowned for its rebellious spirit.

Levada wanted to heal wounds, to halt what he called "the alienation."

"I am open. I am frank. I hope I am cordial," he said in his first public comment.

During his near-decade at the spiritual helm of the San Francisco Archdiocese, Levada ushered in critically needed stability. And he won -- if not adulation -- then the respect of many.

"He is not a run-with-the-herd kind of person," says Monsignor Robert McElroy, pastor of St. Gregory Parish in San Mateo and former vicar general under both Levada and his predecessor, Archbishop John Quinn. "He is certainly a defender of tradition, but he has an independence of thought."

Widely read, with a profound appreciation for world history and high culture, Levada is widely known as an administrator. But to his close friends, he is deeply devotional, an ally of the poor, sick and elderly.

"He's a model, an example of someone truly committed to the church -- he has been so hugely inspirational," says the Rev. Ken Weare, a friend for 35 years and pastor of St. Rita's Catholic Church in Fairfax. Weare, a former university professor, says Levada's influence helped lead to his own ordination three years ago.

"There are spiritual and pastoral dimensions to him that people don't really know about," Weare says. "He is going to the Vatican very well prepared for the job."

Born in Long Beach in 1936 -- parents Joseph and Lorraine are now deceased -- and raised with his sister Dolores in a middle-class family, Levada studied in Rome as a seminarian and later earned a doctoral degree. He was ordained a priest in 1961 at St. Peter's Basilica, then worked as a parish priest and high school teacher in the Los Angeles Archdiocese.

In 1976, he was sent to the Vatican on a fateful assignment, appointed as an official with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. For a half- dozen years he worked at the church's doctrinal hearth, which was eventually led by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now the newly installed Pope Benedict

XVI.

"He was comfortable working in Rome," McElroy says. "He's a convivial sort by nature, but he has always had a great interest in theology. Rome and Cardinal Ratzinger had a very formative influence in his life. It helped prepare him to work with people across the globe."

Years later, when several officials from Ratzinger's office visited Quinn in San Francisco, they roundly praised Levada, McElroy remembers, even though Levada wouldn't work in San Francisco until much later.

"I remember their saying how much of an asset he had been," McElroy says. "He really impressed a lot of people there. He left a very good feeling. That was an important part of the foundation to (his new) appointment. ... It is surprising that an American would be picked for this. To me it means the pope must have a lot of confidence in him. Being an American is not an extra qualification. It makes it more difficult."

In an interview, Levada spoke of his friendship with Ratzinger.

"He was my boss. I've known him well over the years," Levada told The Chronicle during an April 22 flight to attend the pope's first Mass. Days later, Levada became one of the first bishops in the world to be granted an audience with the 78-year-old pontiff.

"He's a very gracious, gentle man," Levada said of the new pope. "He doesn't put on any airs. He knows the church inside out. Nobody can fill the shoes of John Paul II, but if anybody can, he can."

Returning to California in 1982 from his Vatican post, Levada -- by then a monsignor -- became executive director of the California Catholic Conference of Bishops, based in Sacramento.

Four years later, he was appointed archbishop of Portland, Ore., where he launched a $5 million drive for a priests' retirement fund and oversaw the restoration of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. He also served as the sole American bishop on an important church commission, which produced an 800-page volume distilling Catholic teaching.

In 1995, Levada was named to lead the Archdiocese of San Francisco, which encompassed more than 400,000 Roman Catholics in San Francisco, Marin and San Mateo counties.

Then-Archbishop Quinn called him "a man of vision and energy, a man of faith and prayer, a man of conviction and principle, eager to be among the people ... and to serve in gentleness and compassion."

The appointment was "a bit of a surprise," says Tim Unsworth, a Chicago author of a half-dozen books on the Catholic Church and a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter. "But the church was turning to a more conservative front, and Levada was part of that element. He is a conservative, a rigorist. He fits the image of the present pope and the prior pope. When he goes to Rome as the defender of the faith, you bet your boots he will defend it."

San Francisco was considered a pastoral plum, but also a monumental challenge, with disheartened clergymen and disenchanted parishioners.

On hot-button issues -- birth control, abortion, divorce, homosexuality, priestly celibacy -- Levada's traditionalism ran counter to local views both in and out of the pews, and he wound up clashing with city officials in San Francisco on a number of fronts.

He condemned Mayor Gavin Newsom's stance last year allowing gays and lesbians to marry, and he led a march of a thousand Roman Catholics through North Beach in protest. He also had been strongly critical of San Francisco's groundbreaking domestic partners law. He derided the city's granting of a street-closure permit on Easter Sunday in 1999 to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a charitable group of cross-dressing men who don nuns' habits.

Despite political and social differences, Newsom says he respects Levada enormously.

"He has a remarkable ability to adapt in difficult conditions, particularly when it comes to his strong theological beliefs in a city that doesn't always share his thinking," says Newsom, a Catholic who is in the midst of a divorce. "There are a lot of issues there, and for him to acclimate and still engage and be a constructive voice in San Francisco under those circumstances is a pretty remarkable thing."

For his part, San Francisco SupervisorTom Ammiano, who is gay and Catholic, believes that Levada and the church's hierarchy embody a culture of exclusion and resistance to wholesale change even in the wake of the clergy abuse scandal that humbled and humiliated the church.

"I don't think they really pastor to many people like me who are identified as Catholic but are gay or divorced," he says.

To other critics, Levada was an authoritarian more concerned with managerial minutiae and burnishing the church's image than in pastoral care. Detractors found him intimidating, impatient, an echo chamber for unyielding traditional values, a cleric devout in his faith but rigid and polarizing.

"He is noncollaborative, one who rules by fear. I would go so far as to call him a bully," says the Rev. John Conley, who took the unprecedented step of suing Levada, alleging that he'd been defamed and retaliated against after reporting suspected child abuse by a fellow priest against a youth at his parish. The former altar boy later won a $750,000 settlement from the archdiocese. In settling the Conley suit in 2002, the archdiocese admitted Conley was right to contact police, and Conley retired from active ministry.

"His first loyalty is to the institution, and only secondly is he worried about the people of God," Conley says. "A priest is supposed to sacrifice himself and be of service to the people, not to his career. I think the man has ice in his veins. If that's what the Vatican wants, they've chosen the perfect man. He is perfect for leading the church into the 17th century."

Ed Gleason, a local leader of Voice of the Faithful, a national grassroots organization that espouses a larger role in the church for lay Catholics, also finds Levada rigid.

"He has administered well here. He's kept church open. He's very hands-on, " says Gleason, who with his wife, Peg, ran an archdiocese office, Family Life Ministries, from 1984 to 1993. "I think he is trying to make overtures to the laity, but he doesn't recognize us as a legitimate entity. He'd rather we went away."

During years of advocating for victims of clergy abuse, Terrie Light, a longtime Bay Area leader of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, says she grew increasingly distressed by Levada's response to their efforts to expose perpetrators and to salve emotional wounds.

"At the (2003) healing service, his body language spoke volumes," Light says. "It was so symbolic. He sat in the last row by the door. It showed detachment, uninvolvement. He made it not personal. Levada has been about secrecy and keeping things covered up. I don't see him as an agent for change in the Vatican."

In that ceremony, Levada also voiced abject remorse for wrongs inflected by fellow priests.

"As I look back, I may have unconsciously been uneasy or afraid to look at the scars caused by sexual abuse so closely," he said.

He said "my presence here ... provides me the occasion to express my regret and my sorrow for these failings in myself."

That's the pious, holy man that the Rev. Ulysses D'Aguila admired during the last half-dozen years on his path to the priesthood.

D'Aguila, 55, who spent a career as an English teacher at San Francisco City College, was ordained by Levada 10 months ago. Levada was his mentor and spiritual adviser along the way

"Bishops have to deal with things that are difficult," says D'Aguila, who is stationed at Mission Dolores parish. "It is hard to be a bishop and be well- loved. But Archbishop Levada is well-liked and respected by his priests. I swore loyalty to Archbishop Levada at my ordination. At the time I very much felt it. I didn't have to cross my fingers."

Levada was known for painstaking interest in the day-to-day operational details of his administration. Yet he gave his nearly 100 parishes -- he visited all of them -- an unexpected measure of autonomy, his priests say.

"Archbishop Quinn in a meeting would mostly just sit there, but Archbishop Levada, whatever meeting he attended, you knew he was there," says the Rev. Louis Vitale, pastor of St. Boniface Church in San Francisco. "He took a direct hand in everything that happened in the archdiocese. He certainly is his own man. When he first came here, I wasn't sure if he would be a good fit, but he was."

Brian Cahill, executive director of Catholic Charities CYO, the nonprofit social service arm of the archdiocese, worries that Levada "doesn't get as much credit as he deserves."

"Being the bishop of a large urban area is a no-win situation," says Cahill, whose organization serves about 40,000 people a year. "You are dealing with such pluralism, and he handled it really well. Selfishly, I'd like him to stay here. He is such an interesting, powerful combination of a real man of the church, and at the same time he understands the issues of the world."

Considered gregarious and extroverted among friends, hugely fond of movies, bridge and a good meal, Levada came to know San Francisco by taking long walks, sometimes garbed in the anonymity of gym wear.

An avid reader who speaks four languages, Levada loves museums and classical music, and he frequently attended the opera and symphony.

"He is highly cultured," his friend Weare says. "He keeps up to date on world events, politics. He reads many journals, both progressive and conservative. He is one of the most intellectual bishops in the U.S."

Levada took a close interest in the University of San Francisco, a Catholic campus. He taught one theology class to undergraduates, inaugurated a lecture series on Catholic social thought and was part of an interfaith welcome mat when the Dalai Lama visited the campus in 2003.

"He's been very involved with the university, more so than most bishops," says the Rev. Stephen A. Privett, USF's president. "We'd love to have him back when he's the defender of the faith. He is not afraid to listen to people who don't agree with him. That's a very important trait."

For her part, attorney and former supervisor Angela Alioto took the occasion of her annual meeting with Levada this week to prematurely congratulate him on his promotion.

"I asked him 'Are you going to Rome or staying here -- either way a red cap, huh?' " Alioto says, laughing. "He just smiled and didn't say yes or no."

"I think he had a very, very tough few years here -- tough in terms of dealing with lawsuits, issues that archbishops have never dealt with -- and I think he handled it very well, very elegantly," says Alioto, whose pet project is the national shrine of St. Francis of Assisi, San Francisco's oldest parish church.

Levada established the shrine in 1998. She says he buried her father, Joseph, a former mayor of San Francisco, baptized her granddaughter, Chiara, and officiated at the wedding of her son. Now, she hopes he might loan her a few pieces of art.

"I'm going to ask him if I can borrow a few Raphaels," she says laughing. "And maybe a Michelangelo or two from the Vatican Museum."